Who Owns What?

In the brave new World Wide Web, the answer to the question of who owns, disseminates and pays for content, depends on who you ask. “This philosophy that it’s okay to take stuff that you didn’t create is dead wrong,” insists Michael Oreskes, managing editor of The Associated Press, the world’s largest news gathering organization. “It’s true that the Internet makes it a lot easier to do things, but the original material was created by somebody and that somebody owns it,” said Oreskes, who was part of a panel discussion at Macaulay Honors College entitled, “Who Owns Creativity? Copyright and Our Culture.” Other participants included Josh Greenburg, director of digital strategy and scholarship for the New York Public Library; Brian Napack, president of Macmillan Publishing; intellectual property attorney Virginia Rutledge and moderator Bill Goldstein, editor of nytimes.com/books, who came together to examine how the lines between content buyer and seller continue to blur, as the economics of entire industries are disrupted.Listen Now>>